


bird dog

by UnderSelf



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Adoption, Canon Compliant, F/M, Light Angst, Retrospective, There's a baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25340890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnderSelf/pseuds/UnderSelf
Summary: She aims down the barrel of her gun, poised to shoot the stained glass from the estate, putting fifteen hours between Wyoming and Texas behind her and wishing she had the range to crack a bullet through the windows.She shouldn’t have had that goddamn baby.But she can’t imagine a scenario where she doesn’t.
Relationships: Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe/Jesse McCree
Kudos: 28





	bird dog

The world always felt like it was spinnin’ round too fast.

Heists were gettin’ lazy. Lazy meant sloppy. Sloppy meant reckless, and Ashe would never be caught red handed with the kind of recklessness reserved for the less criminally apt. Never was one to overlook the finer details, either, but she still put trust in folk who weren’t quite primed for the targets on their backs. Eventually, all that backfired in blood and bullet powder, much like the pretty gun they stole right out from under some banker’s nose in Juarez. Those early days were spent mostly learning as they went: souring a heist or two, patching the wounds, bearing the bruises, and drafting out much better plans.

Business. But it was good, and fun, and there was a trickle of sweetness that edged her matching bounty when they came upon those posters in the dusty old outback. Unflattering portraits garnished by a sinful dollar amount unequal to the loot they stole to earn ‘em. They bested each hand after that, played each deal and card with experienced deliberation. In turn, lady luck rewarded them in even their tightest gambles.

But odds always shift, and luck runs out eventually.

When they finally slipped, it damn near took the lot of them down in a hard-fought tussle for some worthless weapons cache. Imagine that! Snuffed out, sabotaged by mercenaries she couldn’t have even bothered to name. They took her boys, they took her loot, and they scrubbed out what they could of her operation before she had the chance to pick the pennies up off the gravel. If she learned anything from it, it was that prizes were plenty, but men few and far between.

It’s like a fever dream, now—and she can’t discern the hurt from anger.

Family was supposed to mean something. Carousing along the country highway with her mother’s hired farmhand was unbecoming of a young debutante, but it was all the same sneaking him into her bedroom, fumbling around the dark, simultaneously wrestling with and relenting for his insufferable romanticism. Sometimes there was music, sometimes takeout, and between her stints in and out of the usual trouble, evenings holed up in that small loft of his in their orchard where she knew B.O.B. wouldn’t look.

She liked to think her parents knew, liked to think every attempt to reintroduce her into the charity delegation was their attempt to reel her back from that ruffian cowboy making eyes from the stables. But they didn’t see her, and they didn’t know her, and they wouldn’t have noticed until later, when they realized the ten-thousand-dollar fortune in their vault had gone missing. By then, it’d already been a little over a fortnight since she sped off with the butler in tow.

Throughout their exploits, Jesse was predictably two square meals a headache. B.O.B. may have tired of her amorous inclination with the boy, for all of his wit and charm—but running off with her father’s savings was wholly in tune with the rhythm they found in those early days. Together, they rode down the desert interstate unabashedly loud and tossing windswept vulgarities to the memory of Austin, Texas—stopping only once they crossed state lines, and sharing little of that time together with their omnic of a third wheel.

They made a lot of trouble back then—pissing off the law and making very few friends. Eventually, Jesse fell into the drunk tank with a couple of boys from a clubhouse up in Albuquerque. They favored the gamble for Ashe to post bail, and once she did, the four of them tossed their hats in the ring to pluck a few pearls from the folks who could afford it. _Family_ , as it were. They rustled together their own denomination of rabble rousers worth less than the cheap pleather along their backs, and through all of it, B.O.B. bore her burden: quiet in her recalcitrance as the bounty grew, and devoted to the philosophically untethered code of the Deadlock Rebels.

But it’s all just bitter memories, now. She can’t discern the hurt from anger. That is to say, she can’t stitch up the wounds left by their losses, and she can’t decide whether she’s angry about slipping up, or just hurt by the fallout. It’s been about half a year since, but the gnarled edges of her resolve are still tender. Lying awake to the tune of “eighty ways to make ‘em pay” felt counterproductive to the efforts B.O.B. was making to accommodate her through the thick of it. It’s a subject that devolves into self-reflection, then deflection, and then fitful bouts of frustration as she recalls Jesse’s name stained on the tongue of some snot rag selling tips from a seedy bar in El Paso.

It’s easy to blame him. There are contingencies for when jobs go south, but ratting out to Overwatch to save face felt sickeningly emblematic of who he was. How else does an opportunist barter for freedom? The abdication of his loyalty to the gang—their _family_ —was the ace he played his hand for. He walked watching the bridges burn, embittering the desperation of her surrender as she bowed out without a fight. She’d yield to the heel of the gangs tanking their way through Deadlock territory thereafter, her name barely a whisper on the wind carrying through the resulting pit fight.

It’s embarrassing, feeling hung up on the particulars. B.O.B. flashes his hands, signs at her with ‘Liz’, now, instead of her last name. She keeps herself below the radar after all that, feeling loss and betrayal and some incessant need to curse each day Jesse’s head isn’t on a pike. Half a year should’ve been enough time to load up, strike back, get some of the boys together and make up for their losses with a winning gambit... but it wasn’t. Still isn’t. Every attempt to discern that hurt from anger ends with the realization that it’s been half a year, and she doesn’t feel any wiser, just stupider, and with less than what she started with and more trouble than she can bear under the weight of her own problems.

She sighs, traces the edges of B.O.B’s metal hand, and ponders the light etchings in the cold steel of his plating. Reflecting on what’s happened, what could be, and what already is. She’d been lying to herself for half a year about it. She already knows what that hurt really is, why that anger truly resonates, and B.O.B., for having raised her, essentially, is the only confidant she has.

He blinks, wordlessly, with nothing but the gentle whirr of his internal fans humming in the lull. It’s the first time in a long time she’s been able to tune back into that familiar sound, an echo of the afternoons spent doing schoolwork in the spring. She’s disrupted only by the soft whimpers of the bundle nestled in his arms, past layers of plush and knitted quilt. 

It’s difficult not to peek. B.O.B. cradles the careful memory of her own infancy with the new baby in his arms, and he shifts to adjust for the newborn as she steals a quick glance.

Maybe if none of it had gone to shit, she might’ve said something, might’ve made a different choice altogether. The weeks leading up to their heist were steeped in the usual tedium of the gang’s routine. There was nothing extravagant, nothing out of sorts, and maybe that’s why she keeps thinking about it. The reality where she’s found a grip around that senseless bit of altruism Jesse has, entertains the idea that maybe she does things differently there. In that alternate timeline, she doesn’t even have a child—or she does, but Jesse’s right beside B.O.B., ecstatic and insufferable and wholly enamored with his baby girl. The idealization of who they are is a dull, but more preferable barb.

She takes a sharp and shaky breath, blames hormones, tries convincing herself she hasn’t been pissed for months just thinking about this. She wants to be pissed about literally anything else, but the truth of that anger flares every time Baby squeaks, every time B.O.B. checks to gauge Ashe’s reaction to it. 

Maybe that’s what hurts her most.

She contemplates the fallout and the fractured mess of her gang piecing themselves together out south—contemplates this jewel Jesse left behind in his stead, and thinks hard about the implications of her decisions and each of those foolish, hormone-addled notions of domesticity. Telling him now seems a world away, seems a waste of time and energy and most of all, seems like an increasingly stupid idea. He salted the earth with that botched heist, stoked the flame that burned it, and the gang fizzled with their bounty in the Sonoran embers.

There’s something poetic about all of it. Family was supposed to _mean_ something to the lot of them—to their lieutenants, to their gang—but she foolishly staked her chips on that farmhand with the same trust she put in B.O.B. _Family_ isn’t supposed to abandon each other to lick the grease off of some mercenary’s shiny boot, and Jesse didn’t make good on his loyalty when he cut his losses. Stupid to put her trust in someone like that, and even more so to believe that she meant anything more to him than the value they put in the dingy colors painted along Deadlock Gorge.

Arguably, none of it was as stupid as her decision to carry to term, to selfishly bring into this world a piece of him he’d never even know. It’s an ugly, cruel side of her, and she steals another glance as the bundle fusses, knowing well enough she’s already wielding a double-edged sword.

As the shadows contour her room, moon rising behind the veil of the window, her eyes soften. B.O.B. is taciturn, occupied by the little one and her penchant for putting her mouth on things that aren’t meant for it. Ashe can’t bear the resemblances she sees. Figures that any child of Jesse’s wouldn’t be anything other than difficult or wholly contrary to herself. The only reason Baby isn’t even in the nursery now is because she refuses a bottle—barely six hours into this world, and already forcing a complication on their road ahead. The air stills between each feeding, making Ashe’s throat dry and her chest tight whenever the nurses deposit that tiny creature into B.O.B.’s arms. He looks at her apologetically every time, chirping wistfully from his old broken sound box, and recollecting a time some twenty years back where a much smaller version of herself had also cuddled into the omnic’s heavy chest.

She has too many memories of her own, feels too many conflicting things about Jesse. It’s so messy and complicated and she can’t decide if she’s angry at him, or if she’s angry because she’s still hung up on the particulars. There’s little else in the world that she thinks he deserves more than the lead in her bullet, but he’s even managed to steal her rage, and she’s angrier still because of it—

—or angrier still that she feels anything, that she gingerly accepts the child from B.O.B., and insistently nurtures and _feels_ for her despite every instinct telling her not to.

B.O.B. excuses himself for the time being, collecting their food wrappers and glasses while Ashe reaches absently to peel the hospital gown from her shoulder. Nursing is otherwise awkward, and new, and she fumbles to get the baby to latch properly. She thinks about anything other than the gentle tug at her breast—thinks about that nice family waiting out in the mountains in Wyoming, about how eager they are to meet Baby and welcome her into their lives. There’d be love there, and happiness, and a lifetime’s worth of better memories to be made. She picked them out herself, because her demons sat shoulder-side with the prickling sting of guilt. They willed a deep and broken sense of self-worth to claw at her insecurities, leaving her to ruminate on her own upbringing and knowing well this child would’ve otherwise been spoiled, rotten... forgotten.

It’s stupid. She knows she’s not her mother. She likes to think she feels empathy, to some degree, but that piece of her was always in such conflict with the fractured bits of Deadlock gnawing at the back of her brain. The hurt is too raw, the anger too volatile. Separating herself from the gang is just as difficult as being able to divorce those feelings from each other. She experiences it with the same fire: harsh and red at the edges of her frayed resolve, and she can’t discern hurt from anger because, ultimately, they coalesce.

It’s a curious gesture, but she traces the rounded contour of baby’s cheek and relaxes a little deeper into the hospital bed. These quieter moments spent in self-reflection distract her, at least... but it’s getting harder, feeling more and more unfair.

She adjusts, finally looks down, lips pursed and arms trembling.

Baby is so precious.

Baby is so remarkably innocent, and _good_ , and looks far too much like her daddy for Ashe to justify any of what she plans to do when she’s done here. Baby needs a better home, a better family, a better life. Allowing her indecisive idling to fester as the months passed, to carry to term, to think this secret could only hurt one of them, was just naivety in its rawest form. It all came at a price too steep for the fragility of Baby’s well-being.

She was not her mother. She was not her parents. She was not going to use someone to tout along like a prized champion terrier no one else could afford. It was a lonely upbringing, and she’d be remiss to force that kind of loneliness on someone else.

B.O.B. seems unsure from across the room, fidgets with his hat. They’ve been punctual about the timing between feedings, but it’s getting late, Baby’s stopped nursing, and Ashe is still contemplating the features along her daughter’s face. They’ve already spent too much time together, and though there’s no secret to B.O.B.’s confidence in his charge, it’s a decision she’s already made. He watches Ashe’s wistful lull, hears the hum of an old melody twenty years gone as she soothes that sleepy bundle into a weightless, quiet dream.

There’s love in that melody, and B.O.B. recognizes something in her that she may not even see, herself.

When the nurses finally return, she hesitates. It’s the first time she’s shown any resistance, but she insists she hasn’t changed her mind on the matter. She cannot keep Baby. It feels selfish, and cruel, and for as much as she seethes at the thought of Jesse McCree, keeping this small piece of him holed away feels like retribution less and less. Baby hasn’t done anything wrong. Lighting off the flares in their inevitable confrontation only puts their daughter at the epicenter of a conflict she doesn’t need to know. Their world is cut-throat, merciless, and her intention to gather up the fragments, to build up the legacy of Deadlock’s broken pieces, contradicts any notion that she would be anything other than a negligent mother. She shouldn’t have had a baby at all. She shouldn’t have let herself indulge in who Baby was and what that represented. Baby is so precious, and so innocent, and so very undeserving of this shitstorm of a situation she was born in.

Contrition blinds Ashe’s senses as she makes the decision to give Baby back, to ignore the heart-wrenching wail that echoes through the halls as the nurses carry the child away. For all the gang’s card-playing, hard-gambled cheats and liars, she’s learned well enough when to fold her hand.

Ever at her bedside is the loyalty of her omnic confidant. She’s since turned her back to him. If “family” meant anything to anyone in her life, it was that hapless mix of mech and machinery, and she sobs at the irony of the warmth of a cold, metal man. B.O.B. ignores it, dims the lamp, pulls the covers over her as she lies restlessly in the center of the bed. There are no tears to really cry into the pillow, no feelings she needs spilling over as she hears him settling back into his chair, opening a book for his evening read. She wrestles only with the silence, with the emptiness inside of her, and the knowledge of Baby’s impending visits throughout the night.

* * *

‘ _Have you changed your mind_?’

It's the same hotel suite they’ve lived in for months. B.O.B. signs the question with subtlety, ambling about the room to collect their things. There are plush toys, clothes, and a makeshift bassinet adorning one corner of the room. The omnic posits that the longer they wait, the harder it’s going to be to let go. It’s a blatant truth a week in the making, and yet still, they dawdle.

‘ _They’ll understand_.’

Baby fusses. That nice family in Wyoming left a message on the day she was discharged, and B.O.B. had since been preparing for the trip ahead. It was a long way to travel, and Ashe had already opted out, favored piecing herself back together instead of prolonging the inevitable. It would be the first time in a long time being well and truly alone, to indulge in whatever cathartic exploits would help heal the open wounds. It’s a prospect that brings little solace, but she cups Baby to her shoulder anyway and thinks about family, thinks about how she can’t abandon what she’s started and how hypocritical it seems to send the child along without her.

“Don’t be stupid,” she says—to herself, but B.O.B. reacts by nodding anyway. There’s a much deeper understanding between the two of them that’s always padded her hostility, and she’s thankful that at least, in this instance, he’s chosen not to press the matter further. Baby is always going to be a sensitive discussion; one she’s unwilling to compromise on. She feels entirely incapable and unqualified to make any more adult decisions after this debacle, and to stay her hand on this one, hugely significant thing, is not welcoming to any brand of doubt.

B.O.B. has so many doubts, though. It’s heavy and weighs the silence between them. Where there is incertitude, B.O.B. sheds his sights on potential. Mr. and Mrs. Ashe never took the time to see the complexities in their daughter, and it festered over time. But there is nuance to her, and benevolence, and fairness in her heart—and B.O.B. thinks that baby girl would not be worse for wear if Ashe decided to raise her, herself.

Ultimately, he voices very little of this, choosing to fold, pack, and stack the provisions he needs on the long journey north. It’s no use to argue in observation, keeping that same watchful eye over his charge that he’s kept for the past twenty-three years. He sees her swaddling their newest addition with the clumsiness and uncertainty of a new mother, and despite her every fond endearment towards the child, accepts the grim reality that Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe has irreversibly made up her mind.

* * *

The hour ticks far too quickly. It’s almost time to go, and still there lingers a heaviness between the three of them. In their procession, the silence breaks only by the bustle of the traffic outside, the clack of the automatic doors closing behind them. There, in the parking lot, a small pickup awaits its driver. B.O.B. pulls the keys from his pockets and tests the remote, encroaching upon make and model just wide enough to fit the omnic in its driver’s seat without much trouble. He gathers a couple of their items to shove into the back, securing the car seat with all of its proper buckles, and diaper bag at the ready. B.O.B. Is nothing if not prepared, thoroughly testing every lock, key, and button before ticking his provisions off the list as he loads each article one by one.

Outside, infant in tow, Ashe weighs her uncertainty. She scrutinizes it, finds herself in that same place where she can’t quite figure out what to do with it or what it means. Wyoming is far for Baby to travel. It’s not that sending B.O.B. is cause for worry, either. On the contrary, B.O.B. is the only person she trusts with this—but the prospect of ill-intentioned miscreants creating a mess of their travels is legitimate cause for concern. Their rivals know B.O.B., know Ashe has been out of the circuit for half a year. There’s something deeply unsettling and painful in the realization that before evening, both B.O.B. and Baby will be across state lines, entirely out of her reach.

As her butler loads the truck with his things, she takes a moment to herself. It feels a world over, settling down over the groove of a flower bed where the child rests in her carrier, but only because this is a moment of finality. Ashe fidgets with a farewell nine months and one week to the date, and steals the opportunity as she’s stolen them before. She lifts the weary child as if it were the easiest thing in the world, all eight sleepy pounds feeling just a bit heavier in anticipation. It’s subtle, maybe because her hands are trembling, but a significant shift she accounts for as she gently cradles her daughter against her. Lightly mussed by the linens and blankets she’s wrapped in, Baby squeaks, yawns, and nestles into her mother’s breast.

“They’ll be good to you,” Ashe says, softly sweeping that dark tuft of hair from Baby’s forehead in affirmation. It’s a small gesture, with fleeting thoughts, and the child roots instinctively as her mother’s finger traces the plump curve of her cheek. It inspires just a brief moment wherein Ashe stills, force of habit readjusting so that the child sits a bit lower before she remembers they’ve been able to keep Baby bottle-fed and happy. The ache that accompanies the realization isn’t only physical, but also comes with the added agony of knowing that this first night is going to be their hardest. With B.O.B.’s approach oncoming, she contemplates too much time spent with baby girl, too much time normalizing how good it feels to be at the center of someone’s entire universe.

She observes her daughter for a quiet moment, a kind of peace settling uncomfortably around the shell of her heart. She feels the gravity of the situation pulling too heavily at every other outcome of her endeavor, thinks about Jesse, thinks about motherhood. It’s a scary thing to walk back on, irresponsible to be thinkin’ too much about it at the precipice of her decision, so she quickly turns her question to the omnic with the uncertainty of what she’s doing, and why. “They’ll be good to her...” she repeats, “right, B.O.B.?”

B.O.B. nods. He can’t offer her much else. There’s love in Wyoming, but it’s miles from the love she gives in this moment and even in the moments prior. B.O.B. knows it, she feels it—so she sucks her teeth, holds a breath, and chokes back a quiet sob as the moment passes.

She wants to keep her daughter.

She wants to keep her daughter so badly, it’s taxing to breathe about it. She suffocates as the moments between them become fewer, become shorter. Whatever nonsensical impartiality her parents may have fostered toward her, or whether or not Baby’s daddy was a variable in any of it, seemed to matter less and less. To flee without regard from that trip to Wyoming riddles her thoughts with promises of a happy future, with unconditional love, with grandeur too wild to be without its karmic follow-up.

But she can’t.

She _can’t_.

Her chest is tight, aches with the unfamiliar despair of self-sacrifice—something she can’t quite wrap her head around as it swims with the dizzying notion of Jesse’s altruism. She holds the child much closer because of it, breathes her in, presses her lips to the top of that tiny little head too many times to warrant the gesture without implication. All her feelings, so deeply personal and intimate, coalesce with anger, with so many emotions and unshed tears she fights like hell to repress as B.O.B. lays a hand on her shoulder to let her know: it’s time.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. It’s barely audible, and she breathes it into the child’s cheek in her attempt to pass her off onto B.O.B. slowly, hesitantly. There’s no discernible effort to let go in that gesture, and she fusses with the blanket a little more, smoothes the folds over that fondly woven linen even as B.O.B. adjusts to hold Baby properly. It’s distressing, feeling so overwhelmingly disquieted in that single moment, as her child’s little lungs hitch, as Baby is painstakingly separated from her mother.

Her throat is too thick to speak even a pitch louder as she whispers into the blankets and tucks her daughter into the omnic’s grasp “—don’t cry, sweet pea. Don’t cry.”

Between the two of them, Baby eventually settles, but it isn’t without struggle. Ashe follows B.O.B. to the car where she double checks that everything is secure. She smoothes the sides and adjusts the blankets and puts her hands on everything she possibly can. 

B.O.B. knows she trusts him to keep Baby safe, to get her to Wyoming with each hair in place. Still, he watches wistfully as she withdraws from the back seat, a small piece of herself missing and bittersweet in her conviction. 

Her heart is so heavy, she can hardly look him in the eye.

“Make sure they know her name—"

It’s quiet. Still. B.O.B climbs into the driver’s seat with an inquisitive look blinking along with the LEDs in his circuitry. It’s the first he’s heard of this, unsure if the development is new or if she’s kept it under the veil of her privacy in the past week. 

She taps the edges of his open window in her nerves, swallows thick over the triviality of decisions she’s struggled to make. And maybe it’s unbecoming, but she starts a staring contest with her shoes, shuffles a bit to stay the sadness welling up at her eyes. “You tell them her name,” she says, “I don’t want nothin’ else.”

* * *

The world always felt like it was spinnin’ round too fast—like her feelings weren’t catching up with her thoughts and her thoughts weren’t catching up to her present.

Felt like a bet banked on the slowest horse, and to that effect, felt different trying to close the gap on the outer ring. Adversity, some might call it, knowing already how advantageous it was the closer that horse ran towards the center of the track. It was easy to grow weary of the uphill fight, always so taxing to the morale of the weaker willed who struggled to keep up. If there were any easier way to pull up to the finish line, it probably wouldn’t have been worth all of the trouble.

Outflanked and outnumbered, there were few crumbs left to scrape from the leftovers of the gang war. A half-years’ worth of dust and debris coated Route 66 with memories of the vibrancy of their beginnings, and the fragments left of the Deadlock Rebels were all but swept to the westward winds. Whomever had the police on their payroll now, certainly wasn’t pinching their pennies to keep the old gang from their spoils. It took nine months, one week, and three days to the date for Elizabeth Ashe to saddle a barstool in that old clubhouse in Albuquerque. They’d look upon her as a ghost of her former self, viper still in hand, bullet walking between her fingers. Whatever was left of their raggedy little denomination treaded carefully under her scrutiny, unsure of their former leader and still wounded by the sting of Jesse’s duplicity. She’d scout who was present and proposition those remaining, promise them fortune, knowing well enough they wouldn’t settle now for the small change from an old coin purse.

No. They needed big change, big ambition. Ever at odds, Ashe knew those large payouts were well past due. Overwatch made sure they were three short at the helm, with Jesse ahead of whatever freighter bit its brass into their operation. Patching their wounds, bearing their bruises... It was one hell of a collision, clamoring up and down the canyon with the sound of rival gangs and their gunfire. But they could be bigger, better. They needn’t roll belly up to the bloodhounds on the off chance they’d share their bones. She had plenty of bones, already—to pick, to share... For all the trouble of that half-year, she sat on entire skeletons, buried along two-hundred and thirty acres worth of Blackfoot daisies catching light under the Texas sun.

That’s all it takes. Nine months, one week, and six days to the date, the Ashe family ranch ignites in a blaze as red as the ring of her eye.

But it feels empty.

It feels just as empty as it did seven years ago, just as empty as when trouble pinched her fingers between the bars of a jail cell. There was nothing validating about runny makeup and ugly portraiture, nothing worthwhile about the scrapes and cuts from tussles long lost over literal spilled milk. Family meant nothing on this ranch to anyone that mattered, and what resulted was the self-destructive escapades of a lonely, troubled child, smothered by expectation and sullied by the influence of the less affluent in her company.

Family. She scoffs, thinks about all the different ways she’s twisted that meaning and the connotations associated with it. Mom. Dad. Harboring ill intent and negligent even when they weren’t clinking crystal in Tahiti. Then there was Deadlock, built up from the pieces of her emancipation as she came barreling through on her hover bike, B.O.B. in tow. Funny how the omnic butler had been the closest thing she’d ever have to real family—family that mattered, anyway.

And then, of course, there was Jesse.

She watches the cider house over the orchard burn, watches the boys drink, hoop and holler. They drunkenly cling to the horses liberated from the barn, tossing Molotov’s and wreaking havoc amid the flames. It’s a preface to change, to bargaining bigger jobs, larger prizes. She can feel the burn from the fires, so many yards away, and keeps the memory in her lungs as she breathes deep, ruminates on the hillside.

Jesse plagues the forefront of too many memories.

The ranch, the road, and the gang’s founding feel less like something that belong to her, and more like the tethered remnants of his influence. There from the beginning, there at the crossroads; she seethes at the notion that she’ll never be truly rid of him, snarls at the realization that she keeps a piece of him yet. It’s an increasingly distressing thought that she fights to keep from revisiting, a reality she buries deep to stay the course. She troubles herself only with the ‘why’—haunted by how easy it was to blame him, hate him, and yet still find it in her to carry and bear a daughter neither of them were going to know.

Her breaths become shallow. The fire dances. She thinks about the fifteen hours between her and Wyoming and remembers why she’s here.

Remembers she has a daughter.

Remembers that one week ago, _she had an entire goddamn baby_. Eight pounds of wriggly, sleepy, Texan stock... with a dark tuft of hair and eyes wider than a jack rabbit’s gait. Sweet precious baby girl—who came out looking so much like Jesse, she could’ve bothered to seat a hat on that pretty head and make herself a much more convincing lieutenant for the gang.

And she _seethes_.

She remembers what Deadlock is, what Jesse’s done to them, why they’re out here. She remembers her parents, their negligence, their abject ignorance of her exploits in the troubled history of her youth. She contemplates how the hurt and anger coalesce much in the same way love and loss do. It fills her with such an insurmountable bout of rage, she isn’t sure if what she’s gone through in the last year has made her more human, or less of one.

She aims down the barrel of her gun, poised to shoot the stained glass from the estate, putting fifteen hours between Wyoming and Texas behind her and wishing she had the range to crack a bullet through the windows.

She shouldn’t have had that goddamn baby.

But she can’t imagine a scenario where she doesn’t.

* * *

Local news buzzes with the story of the arson, detailing ten million worth in damages and another five stolen from the family’s bank in Oceania. There are crates stacked a mile high, boys hammering nails into the rotted wood of their old clubhouse, and one Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe busy flipping pin codes to the tune of an inheritance stolen forty years too early.

B.O.B. happens upon their workshop two days from the score, pulling into an old parking space to find his charge on the roof shootin’ whiskey, punching numbers into an old holo-tablet. He sees Route 66 is just as dusty and abandoned as it was half a year ago, still mercilessly sunny, warm, and wanders on over towards the swing of Ashe’s heel. 

The glass in hand and electronics on her lap are no match for the omnic’s approach, swerving her attention from her bank accounts to her butler while he blinks with a curiosity she recognizes from her childhood. It’s a scolding memory, and she bites back the vitriol just a little because it’s been a week, and she’s feeling generous. She’s feeling like herself.

“It ain’t like that,” she says. No greeting, no acknowledgment from the past week and a half that’s been blanked in favor of more monetary frivolities. She takes a drink, mixes the ice, pulls her hat a little further over her eyes to veil her from the sun, “The hell you been, anyway?”

It’s rhetorical, but in just the right tone that convinces folks she’s not become a shell of her former self. The boys putting work into their renovations were none the wiser of B.O.B.’s whereabouts, and they were better off not knowing. She leaves her things on the roof and hops down its shallow ledge to meet him at the doorstep, fights a little with the zipper on her vest, brushes the dirt from her jeans. She’s as put together as she can be after storming the gates, pulling some of the most reckless heists she’s ever pulled, and B.O.B. is curious to know what the plan is. Now, with their leaders gone, with the enemy gangs still hot on their trail, it seems from the surface that whatever’s going on is still in its earliest stages.

“Come on,” she motions for the hulking heap of metal to follow her through the door. “Can’t have you shortin’ out in the sun.”

So B.O.B. follows.

And it’s in the dark, musty wreckage of their old clubhouse that all things come to a head.

When the door closes behind them, she lets her shoulders relax, lets loose the tension in her jaw when everybody is out of sight, out of earshot. It’s the first time in nine months, and two weeks to date, that she and B.O.B. are well and truly the unit they started as. It’s never more apparent now, as she seats herself on a countertop, folding her arms and eyeing her butler with the same old expectation he’d have known of her half a year ago. It’s eerie, and strange, to think that they’d been through such an ordeal, that she was here now, like nothing ever happened.

In the stillness, muted by the clamor outside of the gang’s bustle and poor hammer work, Ashe glances to the floor, dredges up an old hurt against her better judgment. “She take to ‘em alright?”

B.O.B. nods tentatively. 

Baby is such, and always will be, a delicate discussion. The two of them settle in that special sort of companionship best reserved for the only real family she knows, and she furrows her brows against those withering ‘what-ifs’. There were too many days spent trying not to dwell on mistakes past, harsh against the physical reminders of what she’s gone through and what she’s parted with. And though she doesn’t feel as distressed as she may have been the day B.O.B. and Baby left, she still aches, and fears through every nerve that that ache will never really ebb.

“Good,” she says, simply, definitively. It’s good that Baby is in Wyoming, and not in this shitty clubhouse breathing mold and dust and secondhand smoke... 

But B.O.B. knows her, knows that just because it’s _good_ doesn’t mean it’s _okay_. He crosses towards the center of the room meekly, reaching carefully into his pocket and offering his charge the contents within, hand held out and at the mercy of a thin piece of paper gnarled and tattered at its edges.

She looks up.

“Hell, B.O.B…”

It’s a fragile thing, but she takes it into her hands and stares at the grainy reminder of what she’s left behind. She breathes long and slow and studies the bedsheets, the curtains, and remembers just how bone tired she felt lounging in that hotel suite, now one week in the past. It brings her no small amount of comfort, but all the same, does little to stay the ache she feels seeing her daughter’s face again. She fiddles with the photo between her fingers and studies the light shadowing her own face, recognizing herself looking so weary and worn, so wholly in tune to that infant’s every whim. The memory tinges her smile with a wistfulness as bittersweet as her evenings nursing baby, when it was just the two of them, when B.O.B. had strategically left her to do his daily chores. 

She swallows hard, snaps back to it, and tucks the photo away into her vest. It’s not something she needs the boys to _ever_ find, and trusts that B.O.B. is smart enough not to keep a copy stored on his memory record. 

“There’s uhm—lotta loot still needs movin’. Should get to it.”

She clears her throat and sits a bullet casing in the same pocket to keep her mind fresh on where it is, what she needs to do with it later.

‘ _Are you going to be okay_?’ B.O.B. offers a sidelong glance, telling of his concern and a week’s worth of questions still yet to be asked. 

But she shakes her head, waves him away; she’s hurt, and raged, and loved, and lost, and every feeling she could possibly have felt in that maelstrom of emotions over the past two weeks. They’d coursed through her on those rides through the desert, burnt brilliantly in the fires raging across her former family’s estate.

And though she’d never admit it, would never think to tell a soul, fell a few tears in a torrent of her own pity that first and only night she sought her pillow out to cry.

“What d’you think?”

She’s felt so much, and done so little. So she sighs, leans heavy against the backboard of that counter she sits on, and shrugs with the newfound ease of a blooded bird dog back from its hunt.

The dartboard’s lookin’ mighty empty.

“I been through worse.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you and big credit to [FallLover](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FallLover) for beta'ing!


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